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I have no clue where to ask this, so here it goes... With the advent of LK99 and its potential uses in recent solutions for modified Alcubierre drive fields, it pushes me to wonder: What if humanity became an interstellar or even intergalactic civilisation. What would be the universal currency that would unanimously be used to transact?

Im asking about what kind. Being an interstellar civilisation, rare metals would not be a feasible store of wealth as there would be such an abundance. Would it be something like a fiat, or even a blockchain currency? I was thinking even possibly energy as a form of wealth. Pure energy is universal, finite (as far as we know), takes "work" to "make", is easily transferable, can be precisely quantified and has a definite use... Now as to how one would store this energy is a whole other question, so maybe we would only consider the amount of joules that is held in a body? Therefore making more "energy dense" bodies more valuable as they occupy less physical space? This is just random speculation and rambling, but would anyone have any ideas as to this?

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  • $\begingroup$ Never heard of LK99 before your question but it seems to have a lot of potential for being a hoax. However, becoming interstellar (lot alone intergalactic) is a completely different beast. Voyager 1 will need another 16000 years to get into proximity of a star. That said, currency is just a medium of exchange and store of value. There is nothing complex about it and it will simply be whatever is most convenient, within a legal framework, at the time. $\endgroup$
    – AKdemy
    Aug 7 at 6:21

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Interstellar economics is (for now) still a very small field. The only paper that deals with this very important topic (that I know of) is from Krugman link (here is the working paper version).

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Since you asked a rather fanciful question, I'm going to give you a very subjective answer. I would say that the possibilities of what the future currency will be are very open, and it even could be the dollar. However, I personally don't think it's likely that energy will be the ultimate currency. If we look at the Age of Discovery, energy may be useful for storing and exchanging value in the early days of space exploration, but it will eventually be replaced by a centralized currency.

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